"Moore, Ward - Bring The Jubilee" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Ward)

"Wait--" I began.
"In here, Reuben. Soundest night's sleep you've had in a long time. And cheap--it's free."
I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held me. Before I could even begin to think, a terrific blow fell on the right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the blackness of insensibility.


III.

A MEMBER OF THE GRAND ARMY

I was recalled to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skull. Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors around me.
The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an outhouse--many outhouses--nearby. The ground I lay on, where it was not stony, was damp with the water of endless dish washings and launderings. The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In addition there was the smell of death, not the sweetish effluvium of blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull calf or hog knows, but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggoty flesh. Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.
A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the second time. A hard surface was pressing painful knobs into my exposed skin. I looked and felt around me.
The knobs were the scattered cobbles of a fetid alley; not a foot away was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent; beyond him a drunk retched and groaned. A trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately over the moldy earth between the stones. My coat, shirt, and shoes were gone, so was the bundle with my books. There was no use searching my pocket for the three dollars. I knew I was lucky the robber had left me my pants and my life.
A middle-aged man, at least he looked middle-aged to my youthful eye, regarded me speculatively over the head of the drunk. A pale, elliptical scar interrupted the wrinkles on his forehead, its upper point making a permanent part in his thin hair. Tiny red veins marked his nose; his eyes were bloodshot.
"Pretty well cleaned yuh out, huh boy?"
I nodded--and then was sorry for the motion.
"Reward of virtue. Assuming you was virtuous, which I assume. Come to the same end as me, stinking drunk. Only I still got my shirt. Couldn't hock it no matter how thirsty I got."
I groaned.
"Where yuh from, boy? What rural--see, sober now-- precincts miss you?"
"Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name's Hodge Backmaker."
"Well now, that's friendly of you, Hodge. I'm George Pondible. Periodic. Just tapering off."
I hadn't an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand made my head worse.
"Took everything, I suppose? Haven't a nickel left to help a hangover?"
"My head," I mumbled, quite superfluously.
He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching the lump over my ear with my fingertips.
"Best thing--souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine."
"But . . . can I go through the streets like this?"
"Right," he said. "Quite right."
He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk, who murmured unintelligibly. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome collection of rags not fit to clean a manure spreader. The jacket was torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with great gapes in the soles.
"It's stealing," I protested.
"Right. Put them on and let's get out of here."
The short walk to the river was through streets lacking the glamour of those of the day before. The tenements were smoke streaked, with steps between the parting bricks where mortar had fallen out; great hunks of wall were kept in place only by the support of equally crazy ones abutting. The wretched things I wore were better suited than Pondible's to this neighborhood, though his would have marked him tramp and vagrant in Wappinger Falls.
The Hudson, too, was soiled, with an oily scum and debris, so that I hesitated to dip even the purloined shirt, much less my aching head. But urged on by Pondible I climbed down the slimy stones between two docks and pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing water.
"Fixes your head," said Pondible with more assurance than accuracy. "Now for mine."
The sun was hot, and the shirt dried on my back as we walked away from the river, the jacket over my arm. Now that my mind was clearing my despair grew rapidly; for a moment I wished I had waded farther into the Hudson and drowned.
Admitting any plans I'd had were nebulous and impractical, they had yet been plans of a kind, something in which I could put, or force, my hopes. My appearance had been presentable, I had the means to keep myself fed and sheltered for a few weeks at least. Now everything was changed, any future was gone, literally knocked out of existence, and I had nothing to look forward to, nothing on which to exert my energies and dreams. To go back to Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not simply to dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but because I knew how relieved my mother and father must have been to be freed of my uselessness. Yet I had nothing to expect in the city except starvation or a life of petty crime.
Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark, secretive place, gaslit even this early, with a steam piano tinkling the popular, mournful tune, _Mormon Girl_:

There's a girl in the state of Deseret
I love and I'm trying to for-get.
Forget her for my tired feet's sake
Don't wanna walk to the Great Salt Lake.
They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean
I'd return my Mormon girl's devotion.
But the tracks stop short in Ioway . . .

I couldn't remember the next line. Something about Injuns say.
"Shot," Pondible ordered the bartender, "and buttermilk for my chum here."
The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of him with a wet, dirty rag. "Got any jack?"
"Pay you tomorrow, friend."